At the urging of the SC Progressive Network, state legislators have requested that SC Attorney General Henry McMaster issue an opinion on the state statute regulating emergency ballots at polling places.

"After the failure of many of the voting computers in Horry County during the January 19, 2008 Republican presidential primary, where many voters were turned away from the polls, we found that no law requires precincts to have emergency paper ballots," said Network Director Brett Bursey. Horry County election official Lisa Bourcier reported that "80-90 percent" of the county's more than 300 machines malfunctioned. Voters in many of the county's 118 precincts were told to come back later, on a cold and rainy day, because emergency paper ballots ran out shortly after the polls opened and the machines failed to operate.

Rep. Tracy Edge, a McCain campaign official, reported that his mother-in-law was only the 12th person to vote in her precinct, and that she was given a blank piece of paper because they didn't have emergency ballots. State Election Commission spokesperson Chris Whitmire was widely quoted as telling people to vote on "paper towels" if necessary.

Election Day began with voting machines refusing to start up. It ended with them refusing to shut down.

“It was a very stressful day,” says Sandy Martin, director of registration and elections in Horry County, S.C.

She still doesn’t know the precise reasons her county’s
computerized, touch-screen machines balked at starting up last Saturday
as the polls opened for the state’s Republican primary. Some voters who
showed up early complained they were turned away from polling places,
and about 6,000 votes wound up being cast on paper—some on printed
ballots, others on any piece of paper a poll worker could find. The
leading theory for the starting-up problem is that election workers who
prepared the equipment failed to run a final procedure meant to set the
computers’ vote counters to zero.

More evident, Martin says, is that the machines refused to close
down at the end of the day because of a programming error. Because
South Carolina’s Democratic primary is not being held until this
Saturday, the computers were programmed to shut themselves down on Jan.
26—not at the end of Republican balloting on Jan. 19. “We had to go
into the election menu and tell it to close manually,” Martin told me.
Neither glitch affected the vote count, she says.

Still, Horry County has earned itself a minor footnote to
presidential electoral history. It is another tale of voting machine
failure that causes confusion and anger, marring what should be a
gratifying civic exercise in which every eligible voter is allowed to
cast a ballot—and is assured that every ballot is properly counted.
After the debacle of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, we were
supposed to end all this. We haven’t.

Problems with electronic voting machines in today’s Republican South Carolina presidential primary and reports that voters were being turned away from the polls as a result of those problems underscore the need for Congress to move swiftly to provide states with funding to have emergency paper ballots on hand in the event of a machine failure and to replace paperless voting systems so that meaningful recounts and audits can occur.

“Voters are understandably outraged that in this important primary election they could not exercise their right to vote because of the machine malfunctions,” said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause. “This was a preventable and foreseeable crisis. Congress and state election officials must move fast to fix this problem by the general election in November.”

The 2008 Presidential election may hinge on a primary in which the votes are recorded and tabulated exclusively by paperless electronic voting machines.

South Carolina's primary will be pivotal in the nominating process of both major parties. South Carolina uses a paperless touch screen system statewide, the ES&S iVotronic. It is apparent from the state Election Code that this is the system used for primary elections (section 7-13-1900).

Paperless e-voting is reckless in any right, but the iVotronic has managed to become notorious on its own terms.

It is the machine of Sarasota 2006 fame, producing 18,000 undervotes in Florida's 13th Congressional District, as well as high undervotes in other races in six Florida counties that used the machines. It is the same machine whose firmware version 8.0.1.2 was described by Princeton University computer scientist Edward Felten as "terribly insecure" and in need of serious improvements before it used in another election.

Voters got an extra hour to vote in four precincts in South Carolina's 5th Congressional District on Tuesday because of glitches with the electronic voting machines, a judge ruled.

Voters complained through a toll-free hot line that machines were inoperative for about 90 minutes when polls opened at those majority black precincts in Lancaster County, said state Democratic Party spokesman Patrick Norton.

The party sued and asked a Circuit Court judge to intervene, he said. All the precincts were in South Carolina House District 45. The state Republican Party said it had no plans to appeal.

By John Gideon, Information Manager VotersUnite.Org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

November 16, 2005

November
15 was the last time that the once sleepy little southern town of
Bluffton, South Carolina will vote using paper ballots. The citizens of
Bluffton have always gone to the polls in the only polling place they
needed; Town Hall. It has been a long-standing tradition that at the
end of the day, when the polls closed, the citizens of the town would
gather in the hall and watch as the votes are counted.

Each
vote is marked with a slash mark on a chalk board and audience members
call out “tally” each time a group of five votes is recorded.